If you’ve ever tried to paint that late-afternoon light along the coast — the kind that turns the scrub gold and sets the water on fire — you’ll know it’s one of the hardest things to get right in oils. I’ve spent the last few years chasing it up and down the Fleurieu Peninsula and out on Kangaroo Island, and I’ve made just about every mistake in the book along the way. Here are three things that changed how I approach it, in case they’re useful to you too.
1. Start with your darks, not your lights but an underpainting first
My instinct used to be to go straight for the pretty stuff — the glow on the water, the warm highlight on a strip of gum bark. It’s tempting, because that’s the bit you’re excited about. But first i underpaint in acrylic abstract shapes light colours rolled on painted on just get paint down the when dry establish your darkest dark, everything you paint after sits in the wrong place tonally. You end up chasing brightness that never quite arrives.
Now I block in my shadow shapes early — the undersides of the scrub, the shaded side of the dunes — before I’ve even mixed a proper warm colour. A simple dark mix of ultramarine, burnt umber and a touch of alizarin does the job. Once those darks are down, the lights read as bright by comparison, even when the paint itself isn’t all that light. It’s a scaffold for the rest of the painting to hang off.
2. Let warm fight cool, not just light fight dark
Coastal light doesn’t feel alive just because you’ve made the sun patches yellow. It feels alive because of temperature contrast — cool shadows pushing up against warm light. Under the gums on the Fleurieu, the shaded ground is full of blues and violets, while the sunlit patches breaking through the canopy are hot oranges and yellows. If I only think in terms of light versus dark, the painting goes flat. The moment I push the temperature contrast — cooling my shadows further than feels natural, and warming my highlights more than the reference photo suggests — the light starts to hum.
3. Know when to stop blending
Working wet-into-wet is how I get those soft, glowing transitions where sunlight melts into shadow. But it’s easy to overdo it. Blend too much and the whole painting turns to mush — you lose the crispness that makes a coastal scene feel like it’s caught in a specific, fleeting moment. These days I let some edges stay rough on purpose. A hard edge where a rock catches the last of the light, a scumbled patch of dry brushwork in the scrub — these bits of friction are what make the smooth passages feel soft by comparison. Perfect blending everywhere is actually the enemy of believable light.
None of this is a formula — every headland and every hour of the day throws something different at you, and half the fun is not quite knowing what you’ll get. But these three habits are the ones I come back to every single time I set up the easel facing the water.
What’s your approach to painting light? Any techniques you swear by, or ones you’ve sworn off? Leave a comment below — I’d genuinely love to hear how you tackle it.
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